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AbuDhabi/WorldBuilding
Desire: Write a book in Dungeons and Dragons setting. Problem: Dungeons and Dragons setting horribly arbitrary in following Medieval models. Solution: Derive logical consequences of Dungeons and Dragons rules, and build a world (multiverse) on that. TODO: Rethink disease handling. Consider arms limitation treaties. Planars taxing worlds but giving them autonomy. Allowed books Generally, SRD material sans psionics will be considered standard. However, since this is a multiverse, everything has its place. And makes good fodder for further plots. Cosmology The Great Wheel. Outer Planes This is where the radical elements of the cosmic forces hang out. Deities usually make their domains here and safeguard the places from too much alteration, including invasions, colonization and policy shift. As a consequence, these planes tend to stay roughly the same over millennia. The Blood War rages in the Lower Planes, and the Upper Planes try to keep it from spilling over too much on everyone else, which is a full-time job. Inner Planes By their nature, rarely colonizable. The natives are too numerous and persistent, not to mention the conditions. Said conditions are also basically unalterable on any but local scale. Transitive Planes The Astral Plane is just space with some junk floating in it, plagued by Githyanki and less pleasant creatures. Typically not prime real-estate, and therefore left mostly bare except by those who can provide their own bits of matter to cling to. The Ethereal Planes are coexistent with Material Planes, and therefore also not good for much involvement, given that they're just reflections of the Material, and also plagued by all kinds of ghostly nasties. The Plane of Shadow is empty except for shadows, and useful mostly for transportation due to its connectivity with other planes via darkness. Far Realm It's full of spiders. Material Planes There is theoretically an infinite variety among them, but in practice, there are only so many conditions that give rise to life - and intelligent life. Typical Material Worlds Assumptions * Normal physical and temporal traits. Gravity works as expected, time flows regularly. Things can be changed by physical alteration and magical intervention, though not by pure sentient thought or the like. * Balanced elements. The plane is of infinite size, but has finite significant living space for creatures, due to resources such as stable land, water, air and heat. * Mildly neutrally aligned. No pressure. * Normal magic. * Coexistent with its own Ethereal Plane. Coterminous and coexistent with the Plane of Shadow. Effects * Whether the plane is spherical, or flat, or cubical is of no great importance. Of import is, however, that it has an outer space, which can be explored, and perhaps colonized. * Regular physics means that techonological thought can arise, given time and adequately smart and civilized populations within. * Balance of elements means that humanoids and other terrestrial creatures can thrive there, at least in a significant subset of the plane. * Mild neutrality allows any type of creature to exist there comfortably. This means that colonization efforts can have great success. * Normal magic fucks everything up. It deserves a heading of its own, see below. * Having an Ethereal Plane means the existence of ghosts and other incorporeal beings that will plague the corporeal inhabitants. Similarly with the Plane of Shadow, except that it also brings the problem of travelers from just about everywhere in existence. Effects of Magic In any metropolitan area, there live approximately 350000 people. Among them, around 100-150 are casters (adepts, clerics, bards, druids, sorcerers and wizards) who can cast 5th level spells, which are the ones where the fun really starts. Then there are about 200-300 who can cast 3rd level spells, which means they are disproportionately more valuable than noncasters. Casters of 5th level spells can crush opponents' wills, raise the dead, produce anything fast, travel vast distances instantly, hop planes, and generally be badasses who cast Solve Problem. That's a lot of power concentrated in a small amount of people. The only hard countermeasures available depend on having casters of your own, either to cast the spells, or make the items that protect. Power monopoly means rulership. Since rulership is easier for those who are actually likeable, the most likely forms of government would be, in descending order of popularity: # Sorcerer-kings of magical bloodlines, with family-based succession. Rarely, bards might find themselves in the ruler's seat. # Theocracies headed by blessed clerics. Some adepts may become powerful enough to be high priests wielding temporal power too. # Magocracies of powerful wizards, likely modeled around academic structures. # Druidic naturalist domains. # Non-caster dictatorships, monarchies and republics. Besides the really powerful spellcasters are the less powerful. Their numbers for the community mentioned above would be approximately 400-600, 800-1200 - respectively for casters of 2nd level spells and 1st level spells. That's a total of 1200-1800 "menial" spellcasters. Allowing that half of them would be divine spellcasters, that's more than 200 people for every 100000 who can cure most anything the general population catches - not even counting the nonmagical physicians who can handle less severe cases with mundane means. Widespread epidemics of common diseases would, therefore, be unheard of. Childbirth and early childhood would no longer be highly lethal. Which begs the question of low population numbers. Either it is just the beginning of civilized society with these abilities to prop up population growth, or population growth is intentionally suppressed - perhaps caused by druid influence? Low food production is not enough to explain low population, given evolutionary adaptations to scarcity. Extensive warfare could explain it, perhaps. Of particular note are various spells that raise the dead, most commonly Reincarnation and Raise Dead. While very expensive, they make political assassination much harder, because of the need to dispose of the body in a way that precludes raising. Inheritance laws necessarily have to deal with this problem, though there are very many ways to handle it - from strict enforcement upon death regardless of future raising, through time windows for resurrection without inheritance triggering, to presumption of return unless the victim died of old age. Immortal rulers would be especially common in the druidic circles. Divination spells, especially ones that reveal truth, would be common in courts of law, but would not typically be enough to convict, due to the fact that the target could fool or resist them in various ways. Communication spells and items would make ruling even vast empires possible without delegating authority, or allowing too much initiative to local administrators. Magical trinkets replicating 0th and 1st level spells would be exceedingly common, often passed as heirlooms, just as jewelery is. In most families, there would be someone who can cast spells, brew potions, and perhaps put some of their essence into an item for the family to remember them by when they pass on. Among the non-good nations, necromancy would be put to good use. People could donate their bodies to the community, and be raised as mindless undead when they die (commonly of old age) and toil in trades considered too dangerous for living people - such as in the mines. While the numbers of so-animated would be small, due to the control restrictions, they would significantly increase industrial output nonetheless. For lighter tasks, unseen servant spells and items could be used, providing potentially unlimited amounts of low-effort manual productivity. Warfare would be brutal, similar to modern real-life warfare. While the use of magic items by the common grunt would be limited, due to expense, strategic and tactical use of mid- and high-level casters would be expected. Formation fighting would be almost unheard of, given how easily fireballs rip through them. With high level characters having exponential combat potential, warfare would center on their use, with low level grunts mostly providing support. Following from that, the individual value of the life of a common trooper would be very low, to the point where mass assaults that force the enemy to waste their precious spells by paying with warm bodies may see common use. The destructive potential of high level magic can not be overstated in the context of total warfare. Eventually, someone will figure out how to do a magical nuke, and use it. Perhaps they will create a disease that is resistant to just about everything the local cleric-physicians can throw at it, and unleash it on the enemy. Maybe they'll summon something so nasty, so gruesome, that it will level the target and not stop afterwards. In this case, the minimum Intelligence to destroy the world is approximately 17 (minimum to cast 7th level spells). From this, it seems extremely likely that the world is actually caught in a vicious cycle: # Civilization appears from the stone-age barbarism of the past. # Population and magic use grow exponentially, feeding off each other. # A worldwide conflict begins over a relatively trivial matter blown out of proportion. # Someone unleashes a magical end-of-world effect, which kills of 99% of the humanoid population, and renders the plane an irradiated wasteland. # Isolated survivors devolve into stone-age barbarism and eke out a slow growth while the environment recovers over millennia. Non-magical technology would probably be suppressed by the fact of having magic. The kind of precision and refinement required to have a modern technological civilization would not have come into being without iterative improvements on devices commonly used. And crude technological devices would not be invented for lack of need for them, if magic could provide a better substitute. Eventually, with enough population and enough genius-level nonmagical intellects who nonetheless are sufficiently disattached from the social dogma, technology can flourish alongside magic, but that requires the world not to end first. Transplanar Intervention The typical material world presented above is without significant involvement of the planar powers. This begs the question - why? Planar powers have the ability to travel between planes, and meddle. A developing material world would be seen as prime real-estate by colonizers, conquerors or despoilers. Some possible answers include: * Isolation. If there are no known gates in Sigil, travel to the world would be severely limited. If nobody with proper skills went there by gate, they do not know about it, and cannot properly make the necessary focus for plane shifting to work. * Treaties. Planar powers may have, unbeknownst to the inhabitants of the plane, designated it as a neutral territory where they can meet without killing each other. This is unlikely behaviour for the Blood War participants, but may be something the Upper Planes' leaders did. * Divine intervention. If a deity of significant power makes their home on the plane, and have appropriate powers to detect meddling, they may take dim view of interlopers trespassing on their territory. This kind of deity might also limit the destructive potential of the mortals there, if they care about the inhabitants at all... or they might permit or even aggravate the cycle of destruction to keep the power of the populace from rivalling their own. Planes which don't have these kinds of counter-measures for planar involvement are likely to become colonies of lawful organizations, raiding territory for invaders, or places of routine despoilment for those who just want to see the world burn. Divine intervention - of the deities worshipped by the inhabitants of the Material who do not physically make their domain on the plane in question - is another problem to look at. Since they are many, varied, distant and opposed to each other, the effects of their works may be assumed to be counteracted by their divine enemies. This is not the same as being inactive, but for every action a particular deity makes on the plane, their rivals may make an opposite and equal reaction. It may be that they treat this as a sort of game, where mortals are pawns. Society Given that magic replicates many if not most of the trappings and technological advancements of late 19th and early 20th century, it can be inferred that the society of the typical Material Plane may be similar. Deviations are likely to occur mainly along the lines of religious dogma, given that such a world would almost necessarily have to be polytheistic.